CIA Hack Scandal Turns Senate’s Defender of Spying Into a Critic

It’s quite a change to hear Dianne Feinstein, the powerful chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, express outrage over warrantless and potentially illegal government spying.

In an impassioned Senate floor speech yesterday, the California Democrat accused the CIA of criminal activity for allegedly searching computers used by Senate staffers. The CIA set up the computers at a secure location in northern Virginia so Senate Intelligence Committee staff could access classified documents pertaining to the CIA’s detainee program. When some of them found an incriminating document the CIA hadn’t intended to release, the CIA started poking around.

“The CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance,” Feinstein said during her speech. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), head of the Judiciary Committee, immediately followed up with, “I cannot think of any speech by any member by either party as important as the one the senator from California just gave.”

He called it “likely criminal conduct” on the intelligence agency’s part. And, like Feinstein, he suggested it was a breach of the separation of powers doctrine.

Feinstein’s statements criticizing the CIA have particular significance because she is perhaps the biggest senatorial cheerleader for domestic surveillance, including the telephone snooping program in which metadata from calls to, from and within the United States is forwarded in bulk to the National Security Agency without probable cause warrants. A federal judge declared such snooping unlawful last year but stayed the decision pending appeal. The case is before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Feinstein told NBC’s Meet the Press in January that “A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don’t understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan,” Feinstein told NBC. “New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness.”

For Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the ACLU, Feinstein appears to be talking out of both sides of her mouth now that the tables appear to have turned.

“The particular irony is that one of the NSA’s staunchest defenders appears now to recognize the cost of unlawful surveillance.,” Abdo says.

Mark Jaycox, a staff attorney with the Electric Frontier Foundation, agrees. He also said the allegations by Feinstein “should serve as a catalyst for the senator to be concerned with the NSA’s spying on innocent Americans.”

Such spying was “wrong” and “so is spying on innocent Americans. The senator should take notice,” he writes in an e-mail.

Many, including Human Rights Watch, are using the flap to demand Congress declassify the results of the Senate’s torture investigation. And if the whole affair makes Feinstein a little more sympathetic to other targets of domestic intelligence spying, that wouldn’t be so bad, either.